The computing industry has seen many advances in recent years, and such advances have produced a multitude of products and services. Computing systems have also seen many changes, including their virtualization. Virtualization of computer resources generally connotes the abstraction of computer hardware, which essentially separates operating systems and applications from direct correlation to specific hardware. Hardware is therefore abstracted to enable multiple operating systems and applications to access parts of the hardware, defining a seamless virtual machine. The result of virtualization is that hardware is more efficiently utilized and leveraged.
In a typical virtualized desktop infrastructure architecture, user displays and input devices are local, but applications execute remotely in a server. Because applications are executing remotely, a latency element is introduced due to network travel time and application response time. One method of assessing the performance of remote applications is by measuring the response times for various events. These response times are the result of aggregating latency across different components in the architecture. Measuring these latencies, however, is a challenge as measurements must encompass latencies related to both the low level events (such as mouse movements) and the high level events (application launches), as well as work across network boundaries and a range of client devices. While recording the start of an event on the client side is straightforward, recording the end of the event accurately is challenging due to the lack of semantic information, such as for example, knowing when an application has launched or detecting when a character has appeared on the screen.
It is in this context that embodiments of the invention arise.